On a recent afternoon, Lois Freedman, the co-C.E.O. and president of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurants, stood in the new ABC Kitchens in Dumbo, Brooklyn — the restaurant set to open in a matter of weeks. She had spent months meticulously renovating and decorating, sourcing glassware and teacups on eBay auctions and furniture at antique flea markets.
Ms. Freedman now needed to hire 70 front-of-house staff members, train them and open. “It’s like being a casting director,” she said happily. “I don’t really care about experience. I care more about personality.”
This is not Ms. Freedman’s first rodeo. She is the person behind the Vongerichten empire. For 39 years, she has worked alongside Mr. Vongerichten, steadily opening restaurant after restaurant. The result: 60 restaurants worldwide (14 of them in New York City alone).
“Jean-Georges would have gone on to do big things no matter what, but it’s hard to imagine it would have evolved in the same way without Lois,” said the writer Amy Fine Collins, a longtime patron.
Fine dining was not an obvious career path for Ms. Freedman, who was born and raised in Queens. “We grew up eating canned food, frozen food,” she said. “It was about convenience, not healthy eating.” Ms. Freedman inherited her perfectionism from her mother, a housewife, who died from lung cancer when she was 18. Her father, a blue-collar insurance salesman, remarried and moved on. From then, she was largely on her own.
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